John Gruber is puzzled by the rumoured Beats Audio acquisition. I am, too. But this, I think, is answerable:

Nothing from Beats looks like Apple. Not the brand, not the hardware.

Visually, sure. (He did say “looks”.) But conceptually, I think Beats Audio (not the headphones) is very Apple-y. It’s music streaming with direction. The “Sentence” feature alone would be great with Siri, too.1

Clearly, there are facets of the brand that Apple appreciates: if you’ve visited an Apple Store in the past few years, you might have noticed that there’s nearly an entire table dedicated to Beats headphones.

It’s an odd pairing, and I’m struggling to wrap my head around it. There are nothing but questions on my mind.